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Vorpal Sounds 2

You probably haven’t noticed but I’ve decided to give a common name to the tutorial kind of posts, so that I avoid titles like “Yet another sound design walkthrough using CDP vol 15” as that not only looks bad but is also unnecessarily hard to come up with. This one is just simpler. And more catchy. Obviously. I’ll probably change it dozen more times.

Edit: I’ve indeed decided to change it again and simply go for Vorpal Sounds. Read about it here.

Anyway, now that I’ve gotten it out of the way, here’s the sound we’re working on today, another snippet taken from an old record:

The first process we’ll take a look at is “shift1” under the “strange” category. It was my first favorite CDP effect and I still use it pretty often. It’s obviously some sort of frequency shifting but it’s apparently linear and you can usually get strange inharmonic sounds out of it. It also has more advanced modes (shift2, 3, etc.) that you can pick specific frequency ranges and tune them up/down individually. It’s a lot of fun.

For simplicity though, what I did here was just shifting the whole sound up 200 cycles. Here are my settings. Please note the overlap parameter is activated and set to 1.120. I’ll embarass myself a little by saying I’m not entirely sure what the “points” and “overlap” settings do but they appear on a lot of processes (think spectral ones?) and can influence the end results quite a bit. I’ve set it up here randomly just by listening so not much to comment here but I’ll probably talk about them more at some point.

Right, so the shifting effect sounds like this:

Even keeping it basic (and maybe adding some FX), this could work nicely as an abstract loop in an experimental setting but I wanted to take it a bit further. So I convolved it with the original sample using fastconv. More about fastconv on my previous post. And here’s how it’s set up in Renoise. I also maximized both samples before using fastconv.

Until this point I wanted to make an abstract loop but this sounded pretty cool when I transposed it down 11 semitones so I changed my mind and go for a drone/soundscape kind of feel:

So I added some effects in Renoise. No big deals, just a reverb and delay and also an EQ notch to prevent a peaking frequency to overpower the sound. The final result:

Not too bad. A little chaotic but it could work as a drone and I like the incidental sounding metallic clangs and shimmering sounds. And you can keep going using slicing, reversing, transposing, effects, cdp etc. So as you can see, it’s possible to go to a million different places and get more interesting sounds and indeed, I find that usually to be the hardest part in sound design: Pick the best possibilities between almost endless variations. But eventually, depending on your mood and the context, you have to make some decisions, so that you actually get things done.

And that concludes the 2nd tutorial. All sounds are downloadable and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading/listening. Would love to hear some comments and feedback if you have something on your mind. See you around.

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I'm Emre, a 34 year old electronic music producer and sound designer from Turkey. I love playing around with breaks, basses and all kinds of weird samples and this is the place where I share my sonic endeavours. If you'd like to hear more, please subscribe or connect via social media buttons above. See you around!